Grand Challenge 2:
Geoscience Community Efforts to Broaden Participation: How can the geoscience community capitalize on evidence from different scale efforts to broaden participation?
Rationale
Solutions and programs must scale appropriately to the situation and communities at hand. Success and solutions in diversity has no singular solution - healthy programs and communities who are diverse and welcoming exhibit sets of characteristics which are repeated. Studies have shown that while overall success in recruiting and retaining underrepresented minorities has only improved modestly at the undergraduate and masters level (Wilson, 2016) and has not improved at the doctoral level nationally (Bernard & Cooperdock, 2018), research suggests that certain efforts have been more effective that others. Implementations can be divided into large-scale implementations that are national in scope and focus on change within an entire science community and those that are smaller scale and local in scope aiming for change on a particular campus or department. The Macrosystems Framework (Wolfe & Riggs, 2017) below (Figure 3) incorporates the important elements and interactions between the broader "System" and the "Individual."
Ambiguity about where to aim resources derives in part from failure to differentiate what kind of approaches and resources should be afforded to each and using the same measures of success for both broad community-wide (e.g. Peer et al., 2004) and more local, focused or campus-scale efforts (e.g. Blake, Liou, & Chukuigwe, 2013; Blake, Liou, & Lansiquot, 2015; Semken, 2005) . Research literature examining both approaches illuminate ways to focus efforts toward success and suggest that both can contribute to success in recruiting and retaining underrepresented minority students and it is up to the geoscience community to incorporate what has been learned into what we do. Both large scale and smaller local efforts must both be valued, funded and facilitated if the Grand Challenges of providing access and success for underrepresented students in the geosciences are to be met.
Recommended Research Strategies
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- Efforts to broaden participation that are likely best for large-scale implementations include those that critically examine the way the geosciences are viewed by underrepresented minority students. This is important when students first make decisions about what major to pursue and second as students internalize some sort of personal reconciliation between those elements of geoscience study which appear personally foreign or culturally off-putting and elements of a value proposition that can be accepted. Making our disciplines more relevant and more welcoming to a broader group of students will require a broad national geoscience community effort. Refashioning what is relevant about of our disciplines to the cultures we are trying to reach and discarding those things that keep or drive students away will need to be a grand scale effort with everyone on board.
- While implementation will come down to what goes on locally in departments, there is a need for the broad geoscience community to articulate the need for change and suggest goals and a timeline for them to be reached. There is a need for community consensus about how to illustrate career paths so that students (and their families) have some sense that a rational paths exist and that future progress is not haphazard. Templates for how to access and maintain financial support need to be refined and broadly disseminated. Guidelines for and examples of professional mentorship need to be shared. Professional networks for faculty, particularly those working with underrepresented students at community colleges and minority serving institutions, need to be strengthened where they exist and new ones initiated. There must be opportunities for faculty to work together to share student success and engage in student learning focused professional development experiences. Unfortunately, published analyses about what works and what does not in all of these activities is sparse at best, and focused research on geoscience education systems is required at all scales.